Sunday, 3 June 2012

Manus O’Donnell’s life of Colum Cille

Although the Life of Saint Columba is most famously covered by the monk Adamnan, there is a later and less well-known Life by the 16th-century Donegal prince, Manus O'Donnell. It was first translated in the early twentieth-century by Andrew O' Kelleher et al., and this work is in the public domain here. Contemporary Columban scholar, Brian Lacey, has brought out a new edition:

From about 1510 Maghnus Ó Domhnaill (Manus O’Donnell) was a leading political figure in the north west of Ireland. Between 1537 and 1555 he was chieftain of Tír Conaill. In 1532 he completed the greatest cultural achievement of his life, the composition of the Beatha Colaim Chille or ‘Life’ of the 6th-century monastic founder whom Manus claimed as his ‘high saint and kinsman in blood’. The ‘Life’ is an extraordinary work, running to nearly 100,000 words of verse and prose, written, for the most part, in clear, elegant Irish. It is a compendium of all that was known or (more correctly) believed about Colum Cille in Manus’ day.

Like the life of Manus himself, the Beatha Colaim Chille is being recognized increasingly as an example of the extension to Gaelic Ireland of Renaissance ideas and standards. Although the Beatha is not our best source for reconstructing the life of Colum Cille, it does provide an insight into the beliefs, practices and cultural interests of Gaelic Ireland in the early part of the sixteenth century, prior to the onset of the Reformation and the Tudor conquest.

Brian Lacey is Director of the Discovery Programme, author of Colum Cille and the Columban Tradition (1996), and editor of the Archaeological Survey of Donegal (1983).

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Trias Thaumaturga is dedicated to the three wonderworking patrons of Ireland - Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid and Saint Colum Cille. It houses an archive of posts from my former blog Under the Oak and complements my current blog Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae, where you will find posts on the other saints of Ireland.

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Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae is the sister blog to this site and contains accounts of the lives of the Irish saints, plus information on the history of the Irish Church. Visit it here.

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I am an Irishwoman interested in the lives of our native saints. I am not a professional scholar in this field but attempt to keep up with the work of those who are. I am particularly interested in the many obscure Irish saints whose names fill the pages of our Martyrologies.